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Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux

Phoronix: Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux

ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs. ZFS is copy-on-write, self-healing with 256-bit checksums, supports compression, online pool growth, scales much better than the UFS file-system commonly used on BSD operating systems, supports snapshots, supports deduplication, and the list goes on for the features of this file-system developed by Sun Microsystems. In this article we are seeing how well the performance of the ZFS file-system under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 stacks up to UFS (including UFS+J and UFS+S) and on the Linux side with EXT4 and Btrfs.

The only reason to use ZFS, is your data is safe with ZFS. With all other common filesystems, you data slowly but surely gets corrupted. And the filesystem does not even notice this. This silent corruption is really bad. The examples are numerous.

If you value a filesystem because of speed, then you have other priorities than Enterprise users (who value their data).

I don't think ZFS was designed with this test in mind: one laptop hdd.
The test should be done with multiple hdd arrays (and maybe even mixed with some ssd).
Nevertheless, this test shows that ZFS is not such a good choice for a standard (one hdd) laptop/desktop system.

I don't think ZFS was designed with this test in mind: one laptop hdd.
The test should be done with multiple hdd arrays (and maybe even mixed with some ssd).
Nevertheless, this test shows that ZFS is not such a good choice for a standard (one hdd) laptop/desktop system.

Most desktop users though that get excited about hearing about ZFS + Linux possibilities are running such single drive setups though, so this testing is aimed at them (like most Phoronix articles towards desktop users), and not those enterprise installations.

Yes. Btrfs does provide complete data integrity and not just metadata integrity by default. Aside from potential filesystem bugs, this is part of the design. Yum plugin in Fedora 13 already takes advance of the design.